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New Cities

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: New Cities

#151

Post by mikeash »

chris_7 wrote: post #125
mikeash wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The throughput of a column of people walking from NYC to LA would be quite good. But I certainly wouldn't want to cross the country that way. Other things matter too.

This is about cities. Highways between LA and NYC are not "cities" (cities shouldn't have highways in them, see Robert Moses's destruction of New York), so I don't see the relevance (also, fly?). That image also doesn't include that one of those drivers might kill someone, and most of them will turn aggressively into crosswalks. I see and experience those turns every day in New York, and read about the unpunished dea…

I'm choosing an extreme case to demonstrate the point. The same thing applies in a city. Take a city road and fill it with people walking. The throughput will be huge. The latency will suck, and you will not want to go a long distance, even intra-city, that way.

Why do you think so many people choose to drive their own car, when given the choice? It's not because throughput sucks and they just want to stick it to the man.

Re: New Cities

#152

Post by elsurudo »

tmaly wrote: post #72

For me cities with great public transportation are key. New York still has a lot of cars, but the subway system is quite extensive. Portland, OR has one of the best bus systems I have seen. I wish they had more light rails than they do. When I was last there they were just completing the second one. Paris has a great subway system that is very clean, and their roads are very walk able. Montreal and Toronto have great…

IMO Toronto's system is not so great, especially for a city its size. A city that size (especially one with as much congestion!) should have a comprehensive subway system (see Barcelona for a great example), not a measly 2.5 lines.

Sure, downtown the transit is pretty good, but move outside of that, and things aren't all there.

Re: New Cities

#153

Post by toomuchtodo »

massysett wrote: post #122
toomuchtodo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. If you site the city in the US, you can use the existing governance models. Most of the what YC wants to do can be done with local zoning ordinances (tied together with restricted deeds or community lands trusts/co-ops), with the populace (hypothetically made up of citizens who are conducive to this experiment) voting at the local city government level. This is not new territory. They're building a master…

Local zoning ordinances don't fit in 100 pages. The huge body of real estate law that is necessary to give force to restricted deeds doesn't fit in 100 pages. Maybe they mean their 100 pages looks something like "The Law of the City of Newcity is identical to the Law of Dallas, with the following changes:"? Well, the law of Dallas does not fit in 100 pages. Law is complicated because we have built a complicated socie…

I don't disagree, but HN can merely add to existing law with their self-built city; they're not going to be able to negate existing country/state/province law, so why would they need to fit all law within 100 pages?

Find the locality that already meets your needs closest, iterate from there.

Re: New Cities

#154

Post by nibs »

aestetix wrote: post #112
maxerickson wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for your clarity, I downvoted the generic slur that you kicked things off with.

That's reasonable. I was pretty upset when I started writing the piece, and feel more rational now. However, by "aspie" I specifically mean someone detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people. Is there a better word you would suggest I could use?

People with Aspergers often have to turn off emotions because they are too intense, the rationality is a coping mechanism. People perceive a lack of emotion, but really it is just that it is easier to view the world as rational than it is to cope with accepting the irrationality. I say this with three psychiatrist-diagnosed (pre DSM revision) "Aspies" in my immediate family.

Feeling emotions, feeling empathy and having a sense of duty towards others are three different things. Lacking emotions would probably be considered an affective disorder or unipolar depression. Lacking empathy can be antisocial personality disorder or other personality disorders at the most extreme end. And lacking a sense of duty towards others could be anything really.

I have found that Aspies actually want to help the world, and that the hard part is actually doing the interfacing with the world. Phone calls with neutrotypical people, pretending to be extroverted enough to keep a job, trying to explain things and take people's fear response into consideration without just reducing it to a question of binaries and logic. That is the hard part.

Re: New Cities

#155

Post by zephjc »

jrowley wrote: post #127
zephjc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to make a semantic distinction between 'streets' and 'roads'. A typical one is: Streets are things which are where humand can play, people bike and walk, go to stores, around the places we live and work, etc. They are 'Places' where people can live about their day to day lives. Very human-friendly. 'Roads' which are higher-speed connectors between Places. Highways are a very high-speed type of roads. I…

This is interesting stuff. Where'd you learn about this distinction?

Strongtowns I think was my first introduction to it. Here's a good recent article on it

http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/5/22/engineers-shoul...

Note his definitions are a little different than what I used, but have roughly the same point

Re: New Cities

#156

Post by elsurudo »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #26

There is an example of a player of SimCity creating the optimal city which consisted of a reusable grid of components ensuring everyone had access to work and services within a reasonable distance from their homes [1]. There were a lot of assumptions that went into it - including perpetual access to water and a completely flat layout - but it at least seemed to validate the belief I have had that a city at heart simp…

What you describe about Rome seems to apply for many many European cities. Many of them seem to have "mini-downtowns" scattered about, as opposed to the downtown-in-center-and-suburbs-everywhere-else that is common in North America.

Re: New Cities

#157

Post by nostrademons »

devinhelton wrote: post #58

The list of high-level questions is missing the most important question: how do you bootstrap the economy? There are plenty of awesome locations in the United States that have cheap land with great geography, but that have no jobs. The reason people flock to cities with such insane real estate prices is because that is where the jobs are. This is where Y Combinator could play an interesting role though. Could you ima…

Paul Graham had an essay once where he suggested the critical element was a university:

http://paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

Build a top-notch research university and convince a dozen of the smartest professors and a few independently-wealthy angel investors to move there, and you'll soon have a city. Because where top professors go, students will go. Where you have smart & ambitious students and adventurous money, you'll have startups. Where you have startups, you'll get jobs. And where you get jobs, you'll get cities.

Re: New Cities

#158

Post by elsurudo »

jballanc wrote: post #120

Assuming that you can avoid the problems of "old" cities by simply starting out with the right "new" city is like assuming that you can avoid scaling a web application by starting from the very beginning building micro-services. The "new" city that plans for being big will never attract enough people to grow much like businesses that start with micro-services will never be agile enough to find market fit and grow to…

Good thoughts. Riffing off of this, you can view successful-but-dysfnuctional cities as having what is an analogue of technical debt.

Re: New Cities

#160

Post by matthoiland »

sama wrote: post #78
davidw wrote: post #17

I think "old cities" are pretty good too: the kind where they were built for people, rather than cars, and where you could build things without a dense thicket of regulations almost entirely unrelated to safety. Another thing that seems to work well is limiting the amount of up-front large scale projects and growing incrementally. No one can plan for everything ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_pro…

Cars have a place in cities but maybe they should be in tunnels underground or something. I view money locked up in real estate as money in a very suboptimal place. We pay too much 'rent' in general; it'd be far better to try to make housing/office space cheap and have people invest the extra money in productive assets.

Reminds me of Walt Disney's original plan for Epcot, with pedestrian-only on the surface, and trains and supply trucks underground. You can find his presentation (very Howard Stark-like) on Youtube (v=sLCHg9mUBag).
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